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Sunday, November 10, 2013

TV Review: 'The Walking Dead'-4.05-"Internment"

Last week on AMC’s The Walking Dead
dropped a bit of a bombshell on viewers, and it didn’t even involve any key
players dying. Rick (Andrew Lincoln) actually made a decision, and that
decision was to banish Carol (Melissa McBride), an OG member of his crew. What
do they have in store this week as a follow up? Read on to find out.

For everything else going on in this episode, “Internment”
really belongs to Hershel (Scott Wilson). The wise old owl of the group is at
the center of the hour, both emotionally and action wise. You see the depth of
his dedication, his true strength, and just how willing he is to put himself in
harms way to help his fellow survivors. The entire episode is a continual
escalation of tension, on a grand scale as well as an individual level, and
will leave you hanging and ready for more.

When Rick returns to the prison, things are going from bad
to worse. Really they’re going from terrible to even more terrible, but it’s
all a matter of perspective. Threats are coming from all directions. The
zombies outside the stronghold are about to break through the ever-weakening
fence. Inside the walls, the sickness is getting worse, and the infected have
less and less time. Though Rick is back, Daryl (Norman Reedus), Michonne (Danai
Gurira), and the others are still out on the road, looking for meds, and
otherwise unaccounted for.

With all of this going on, the whole Carol situation remains
on the back burner. Rick tells Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and her dad, but there are
other, more immediate matters to attend to. Without meds, Hershel runs back and
forth, attending to his patients, unable and unwilling to give up on anyone, no
matter how far gone. His compassion and humanity won’t allow him to quit, even
though the situation looks hopeless to everyone, even those directly involved. He’s
in for a harsh slap from reality.

For a moment, they achieve a delicate balance in the prison.
Hershel makes his rounds, providing comfort and even moments of levity, Rick
and Maggie work to reinforce the fence and clear off the pile of walkers. Things
are bad, but they’re not getting worse. If you’ve watched The Walking
Dead at all, you know exactly how fleeting such moments can be, and
before awful long, everything goes straight to hell. Glenn (Steven Yeun), Sasha
(Sonequa Martin-Green), and many of the faceless new additions, are on the
verge of death, and when they start to fall, it’s a domino effect, one toppling
after another. If you know their name, or they were in the show before this
season, they make it out relatively unscathed, but the faceless newcomers are
screwed. At this point there can’t be many of them left since they keep getting
wiped out in large sweeping chunks.

At the same time this is going on in the makeshift infirmary,
the fence finally breaks, and the zombies flood in like the prison sprung a
leak. Rick and Carl (Chandler Riggs) share a little father-son zombie slaughter
bonding time, which they need. They haven’t had much quality together time, and
what brings generations together like the wholesale slaughter of the walking
dead? And Carl learns an important life lesson, one that will serve him well
throughout his young life, how to fire a machine gun.

After everything calms down for the time being, and Hershel
has a quiet moment to himself, you see the toll all of his heroics—and Sasha is
right to call him a hero—and he finally breaks down. As an earlier conversation
points out, after they make it past this, if they make do
indeed make it, nothing is ever going to be the same, not for the group, for
Hershel, for Rick, or anyone else.

“Internment” continues the season four trend of leaving you
out on a ledge with a serious cliffhanger, and the final moment is a doozy this
time around. Nothing has been said about Carol’s absence—there have been more urgent
ways to spend their time—but at the end, when Daryl finally gets around to
asking about her, the awkwardness index jumps a few notches. When your friends
say, “I won’t tell you, you need to talk to this guy,” nothing good ever comes
from that. This is like the post-apocalyptic version of “we need to talk.”
Daryl is still the best character on the show, but he’s also an ass kicking wildcard,
and there’s no telling how he’ll react when he finds out his pseudo-love
interest has been banished by his best bro.

And if impending stress and weirdness between Rick and Daryl
isn’t enough to throw a monkey wrench into prison life, the final shot leaves you
with an interesting little nugget to chew over for a week. As the camera pulls
back from the prison, in a nice nod to POV horror, the last thing you see is a
stern looking, one-eyed gentleman you may recognize. Yes, we all knew it was
coming, but the Governor (David Morrissey), the primary antagonist of
The Walking Dead season three, is back in the mix. What
exactly this means for the survivors, remains to be seen, but with all their
troubles, not to mention their dwindling numbers, the last thing they need is an
all out throw down with an unhinged psychopath and whatever makeshift army he
has cobbled together.

What did you think of “Internment?” How is Daryl going to
take the Carol news? Are you excited to see more of the Governor? Let us know
in the comments. And here is a sneak peek at next week’s episode, “Live Bait.”